title: The organisation of musical semantic memory: evidence from false memories for familiar songs.
abstract: By adapting a well-known paradigm for studying memory for words-the Deese-Roediger-McDermott or DRM paradigm (Deese, 1959, Roediger & McDermott, 1995)-the two experiments reported here explore memory for song titles and song clips. Participants were presented with five song titles (Experiment 1a) or five 30-second song clips (Experiment 1b) for each of nine popular artists (e.g., Robbie Williams). The most popular song identified for each artist in a pilot task was omitted from the sets of titles/clips. Following a distractor task, participants were asked to write down as many of the songs as they could recall. They were also asked to return a week later and complete a second recall task. Participants falsely recalled a significant number of the related but non-presented songs in both experiments and this increased a week later, while correct recall for presented items decreased. The results are discussed in terms of theory for musical memory as well as in the context of providing a novel method for exploring the organisation of musical memory.
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology , Keele University , UK.
authors.forename: Susan M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Sherman
authors.forename: Jo
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kennerley
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D009146:Music / Q000523:psychology*; D012660:Semantics; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: DRM paradigm; False memory; Familiar songs; Free recall; Musical memory